I’ve decided to opt-out of the global recession. I’ve considered it, and I’m not participating. I’m happy to report that I’m not alone and that, so far, it’s going well.
I invite you to join me! We won’t be a popular gang. People won’t appreciate our joy. They won’t necessarily like hearing about our rising profitability or increased revenue. Through no fault of our own, we will trigger others.
But we won’t apologise. We won’t shrink. We won’t feel ashamed because making ourselves smaller doesn’t make other people bigger. It just means we’re all small, together.
I’m not denying my luck or privilege nor am I minimising the very real hardships that others face. But business owners who are thriving right now are not sitting in front of the nightly news, wringing their hands and fretting.
If you’d like to thrive in business, and you’re committed to DOING, not worrying, then join me in opting out.
It’s not you, it’s your business model
July 1 is a clean slate to review your books, and get stuck into examining your business model. Your business model is simply the way you earn money.
In my Hustle & Heart program, participants learn how to do a profit plan, which involves figuring out what they’re selling, at what price point, and how many they need to sell in order to reach their income target. Oftentimes this lesson is enough to cause owners to see how they will never reach their income target with their current business model.
It doesn’t matter how excellent you are at what you do, or how good your marketing is, if your numbers don’t add up to your income target, then it’s not you, it’s your business model.
To solve this dilemma, you can:
- Create assets to leverage, such as online courses or programs.
- Introduce a premium-priced offering.
- Diversify your income streams (always a smart move).
- Change your business model.
If you want to earn more money, you must get comfortable looking at your incomings and outgoing and examining your business model. Tinkering with branding and marketing while avoiding your numbers is like putting lipstick on a pig.
Do more marketing, not less
It’s well documented that businesses that increase advertising spend during a recession while their competitors are reducing their’s, can improve market share and return on investment than during economic booms. Why? Because most businesses do the opposite. When everyone is waltzing in one direction, you want to tango in the other.
The three pillars of content marketing are now more powerful than ever: your marketing needs to be useful, it needs to be valuable and it needs to be relevant to your ideal client. (I aim to make all my free training assets are valuable as paid training).
The third pillar – relevance – is even more important right now because people’s priorities have changed. They are still buying, but they’re buying at two ends of the spectrum: frivolous, fun or feel-good things, and ‘necessary’ things. Which means there’s less room in the middle.
So what does this mean for you? Rewrite and reposition your offerings at one of these two ends. You don’t need to necessarily change what you sell but how you talk about it.
Learn new digital skills
More people are online than ever before and more businesses are getting online. Which means we need to be better at standing out. Figuring out our unique marketing style and message, getting more social media savvy, learning how to optimise our blog posts, and how to sell online is crucial.
This is the time to invest in learning new digital skills so that you can turn up the volume on your reach and relevance.
Surround yourself with rollers
In a global recession, it’s even more important to choose your company wisely and be ruthless with who you hang with.
Let’s take Facebook as an example. Some Facebook business groups have a passive-aggressive poverty mentality, where ‘Congratulations!’ is shared with gritted teeth. If some poor, misguided sod asks advice on how much to charge, then woefully unqualified people will rush to give vague, authoritative-toned answers, or suggest a pitifully low rate. Taking advice from people in these groups is akin to setting up camp on a glacier – frightening, silly, and potentially life-threatening.
Other groups are full of diverse, supportive, joyful, successful and inclusive business owners who seek to lift each other up. These groups of people recognise that one person’s gain is everybody’s gain because it creates momentum for the group and shows others what’s possible.
When there’s bad news everywhere, it’s especially important that your boundaries are strong and you’re protecting your enthusiasm from well-intended others. It’s crucial that you choose wisely who you talk with about business, and that absolutely includes your nearest and dearest. While it might be heartbreaking that we can’t have open, honest conversations with our loved ones about our businesses, these are also the people who are best placed to subtly (or directly) undermine our confidence. So we need to pick our company and pick our conversations.
Right now, you need all the confidence you can get which means stellar boundaries and exemplary company.
Are you ready for change? For exemplary company, consistent $10K+ months, magnifying your impact, and no more energy vampires? Then join my Hustle & Heart program.
